Climate reparations and the colonial continuum: Why Africa needs a Pan African agenda
Elmina Castle, Ghana credit: Maxx Sas
Editor’s note: This blog post is based on a recent research article published in the African Human Rights Yearbook, with a special focus on the African Union’s Theme for 2025 on Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations.
With this article the authors extend an invitation for African scholars, policymakers, activists, and communities to co-create a Pan African climate justice agenda that centres historical truth, redistributive justice, and structural transformation.
Climate change is often framed as a complex technical environmental problem: rising emissions, extreme weather, with a focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
But this narrow framing misses a critical dimension of the climate crisis. At its core, it is a justice issue rooted in centuries of colonial exploitation and racialised extraction.In our research article, published in the African Human Rights Yearbook, we argue that the climate crisis must consequently be understood within a longer historical continuum.
The systems that created modern industrial economies were built through slavery, colonialism, and the large-scale extraction of resources and labour from colonised territories. These processes reshaped African societies and ecosystems while generating wealth elsewhere, as land, labour, and resources were reorganised through systems of racialised dispossession to serve colonial metropoles, laying the foundations of today’s unequal and carbon-intensive global economy.
Recognising this history matters because it changes how we frame responsibility for the climate crisis and the pathways for addressing it.
Africa’s climate vulnerability is not accidental
African countries have contributed only a small share of global greenhouse gas emissions. The entire African continent accounts for roughly 3-4% of cumulative global CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution, yet it already experiences some of the most severe climate impacts. In several African economies, losses from extreme weather events already amount to up to 5% of annual GDP, while the estimated financial needs for climate response are between US$187 billion and US$359 billion each year.
The scale of these impacts is visible in recent disasters. Cyclone Freddy in 2023 struck Mozambique, Malawi, and Madagascar, killing more than 870 people, displacing over one million, and destroying homes, farmland, and critical infrastructure across the region. In 2024, extreme rainfall and flooding across East Africa killed hundreds of people and displaced hundreds of thousands, including more than 200,000 people in Burundi and more than 190,000 in Kenya, a pattern that is repeating.
These impacts are not simply the result of geographic exposure to climate hazards. They reflect deeper structural conditions shaped by centuries of colonial extraction and unequal development.
Colonial rule reorganised African economies around resource extraction to the benefit of imperial metropoles. Forests were cleared for plantations. Resource intensive mining was rapidly expanded. Land was appropriated and agricultural systems were transformed into export-oriented cash crop monoculture. These processes degraded ecosystems, decreasing climate resilience and disrupting social systems that had previously supported environmental stewardship.
At the same time, colonial governance structures embedded African economies within global trade networks designed to benefit metropolitan powers. Even after independence, many of these patterns continue to persist through debt structures, resource extraction, and unequal economic relations.
The result is that many African societies are left to confront the accelerating impacts of climate change with weakened socio-economic and ecological resilience. Fiscal constraints further limit the ability of governments to invest in adaptation and resilience. More than half of African countries now spend more on interest payments on public debt than on health care, severely restricting the resources available to respond to climate impacts.
What we see today is therefore not mere “exposure” to climate hazards but rather the continuation of structural inequalities produced over centuries. In that sense, climate change can be understood as the latest manifestation of a longer history of racialised and colonial harm.
Limits of global climate governance and the case for reparations
This history also exposes the limitations of the current global climate governance framework. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was established to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations and protect present and future generations from dangerous climate change. Yet more than three decades of negotiations have largely avoided confronting the deeper questions of historical responsibility and structural injustice that underpin the climate crisis.
Recent developments illustrate these shortcomings. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, established after years of political struggle, represents an important recognition that climate impacts are already causing harm that cannot be prevented through mitigation or adaptation alone. However, the current design of the fund remains based on voluntary contributions. Existing pledges fall far short of the scale of need. While developing countries face loss and damage costs estimated at US$400 billion annually, the total pledges made to the fund so far amount to less than 0.2% of this amount.
At the same time, global policy responses to date continue to rely heavily on market-based mechanisms such as carbon trading and offset schemes. Such approaches often treat climate change primarily as a technical problem of emissions accounting rather than a matter of accountability and justice. Dubbed ‘carbon colonialism’, such practices risk reproducing existing inequalities by enabling continued emissions elsewhere while shifting mitigation burdens onto land and communities in the Global South, even as climate harms persist.
This is where the concept of climate reparations becomes central. Climate reparations frame the climate crisis as a matter of redress and transformation rather than something that can be solved through aid or voluntary finance. As clarified by the International Court of Justice in its 2025 advisory opinion, where wrongful acts cause harm, responsible actors are required to provide remedy, including compensation, restitution, rehabilitation, and guarantees of non-repetition. The Court affirmed that states have obligations to prevent climate harm and to cooperate in addressing it, and that a failure to do so may give rise to duties of reparation. This strengthens the legal foundation for claims relating to climate responsibility and reflects a broader shift toward accountability for climate harm in international law and litigation. . This shift is further reinforced by the recent United Nations General Assembly resolution declaring slavery and the slave trade as the gravest crime against humanity, explicitly affirms reparations as a pathway for remedying historical injustice and strengthens the broader normative basis for claims grounded in historical responsibility.
Towards a Pan African climate reparations agenda
For African countries and peoples, these developments raise a strategic question: how Africa should position itself within emerging global debates on climate responsibility and reparations. African and Afro descendant reparations movements have historically focused on slavery, colonialism, and racial exploitation, playing a critical role in advancing claims for redress. Yet the climate crisis has largely remained peripheral to these frameworks, despite the close overlap between regions most affected by climate impacts and those shaped by colonial extraction. Indeed, for African states and peoples, the climate crisis cannot be separated from the economic, financial, and political structures that reproduce vulnerability and perpetuate colonial legacies. Integrating climate reparations into the broader reparative justice agenda thus allows contemporary climate harms to be understood in the context of this longer history, while opening new legal, political, and institutional pathways for response.
A Pan African climate reparations agenda would involve a coordinated African led effort linking climate justice with historical justice across the continent and the diaspora, bringing together research, advocacy, litigation, and policy reform around the objective of structural redress.
Developing such an agenda requires aligning African led research, legal and policy strategies on state and corporate responsibility, and coordinated positions by governments and regional institutions in international processes, at a time when momentum is building through the African Union’s Decade on Justice through Reparations and evolving regional legal developments on climate responsibility.
Fundamentally, a Pan African climate reparations agenda is not simply about financial transfers. It implies reshaping the political, legal, and economic structures that have historically produced climate vulnerability. By connecting climate action with the wider struggle for reparative justice, African actors can help shift global climate governance toward more equitable and accountable futures.
